With recent advances in technology, the traditional notion of a “computing device” is evolving from a typical desktop or laptop computing system to include such ultra-mobile devices as personal digital assistants (colloquially referred to as PDAs, or “palmtop” computers), and wireless communication devices such as, for example, wireless cellular subscriber units (or handsets), and personal handy-phone (PHP) communicators. With this rapid evolution comes the expectation from the consuming public that such mobile computing devices will provide all of the networking features that they enjoy on their desktop computing systems, i.e., electronic mail (email), Internet access, and the like. Accordingly, wireless communication systems have evolved, albeit slowly, to provide such mobile computing devices with enhanced data services.
Those skilled in the art will appreciate, however, that this evolution is not yet complete and that conventional techniques for interfacing wireless communication devices with a global data network such as the Internet have yet to be perfected. A number of limitations still exist which have retarded acceptance and use of such wireless computing devices to access data networking resources.
One of the limitations associated with providing such enhanced data services lies in the original architecture of each of the wireless communication system(s) and the data network(s). Architecturally, the wireless communication infrastructure and the data networking infrastructure each rely on technically disparate communication protocols to facilitate the flow of information between network elements. Currently, to access a data network using a wireless computing device, a wireless connection is established from a modulator/demodulator (MODEM), coupled to the client computing/communication system, and a basestation using a wireless communication protocol, whereupon a point-to-point connection is established with a network access server (NAS, also referred to as an Internet Service Provider (ISP), a tunnel switch, and the like), which provides an Internet Protocol (IP) connection to any of a number of network resources (e.g., content servers).
To traverse these otherwise disparate networks, a process colloquially referred to as tunneling is employed. Tunneling involves encapsulating a data packet conforming to the protocol of the communication end-points (e.g., the wireless computing system and the desired network end-point) within a wrapper data packet conforming to the protocol of the transmission means to facilitate transmission of the encapsulated data packet across network boundaries.
An example of a popular tunneling protocol is described in the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) Request for Comment (RFC) 2661 entitled Layer Two Tunneling Protocol (L2TP), by Townsley, et al. (August, 1999), which is incorporated herein by reference for all purposes. L2TP is a protocol from the IETF for creating virtual private networks (VPNs) over the Internet. One of the appealing attributes of L2TP is its support for non-Internet Protocol (non-IP) protocols. Simplistically, the L2TP is defined as a series of control instructions with embedded control attributes, referred to as an attribute-value pair (AVP). L2TP, as it currently exists, provides an efficient means of multiprotocol communication in a static (i.e., non-mobile, e.g., desktop) networking environment.
That is, the current L2TP architecture does not anticipate the need for wireless handovers, wherein an internet communication session will move from one network end-point (e.g., basestation) to another. In this regard, L2TP fails to address mobile-centric security issues such as, for example, authentication during handovers. Security issues aside, simply applying conventional L2TP to mobile computing environments would result in the creation of obsolete communication sessions (colloquially referred to as zombie communication sessions) between the basestation that is no longer servicing a particular computing client and the network access server. It will be appreciated that even though they are no longer servicing a particular computing client, they continue to consume system resources (e.g., basestation, tunnel switch and/or network access server) degrading system performance. Insofar as the network resource is not “aware” of the change in the point of access of the wireless communication device, any response by the network resource to currently pending requests will likely be routed via the zombie communication session and, thus, will not be received by the wireless communication device.
Each of the limitations identified above has served to retard acceptance and adoption of the technology by consumers. Accordingly, a system and related methods facilitating enhanced data services to wireless communication devices is required, unencumbered by the limitations commonly associated with conventional techniques. Just such a solution is detailed below.